Strip Paintings

A Strip Painting is a panel of horizontal bands hung over the empty fascia of a vacant shop. Its colours come from the street around it... the signs, the facades, the neighbours' paint. The gap in the street is filled with the street.

The method is the same every time. Photograph the site. Reduce it to twelve colours by how much of the street each one covers. Give each colour strips in proportion to its share, so a dominant sign gets the widest bands and a flash of trim the thinnest. Order them by one fixed rule. Fifty-five strips at full intensity. The rule never changes, and no two sites give the same painting.

Every Strip Painting carries one red strip, sixteen up from the bottom, twelve millimetres high. It is the one colour not taken from the street. The red line is the constant.

Gerhard Richter made his Strip paintings by slicing one of his own abstracts into bands. These slice a street instead. The pigments are carried on from PixelArcade, and the panels are built for weather, because the gallery for this work is a footpath.